The rotten apple: a crime against man or God?

In Ch. V, Locke says that God gave the earth and its goods to mankind in common to rely on for their subsistence. The only natural property a man has is his body. But if man is going to take advantage of the goods God gave him, there must be a way for him to appropriate some personal property. A man can claim something as his own if he puts the labor into acquiring or producing it. He need not the consent of others to claim his property, for it is the natural right of man to reap what he sows.

Because God has supplied mankind with plenty more than need be, man can acquire as much as he can use without it spoiling. If a man acquires too much and it spoils, however, he has surpassed his rights as an individual man and thereby committed a trespass against the rest of mankind. For this, he is liable to punishment. But why?

Is there any rational basis for such punishment? The reason Locke gives is that it is only rational to take what you need: why waste something if you’re not going to use it? It may seem that it is only rational to do take only as much as you need, but this need not imply that it would actually be irrational to take more than you need, even if it spoils. The reason Locke says the man has committed a trespass against the rest of mankind is that he has taken from them. But has he? Has not God supplied man with plenty more than mankind could ever need? It doesn’t seem that letting the fruit spoil actually does harm anyone at all. Why didn’t Locke say that there actually were a limited number of resources. This would make punishing a “trespasser against mankind” legitimate. But he can’t say such a thing, for 1^st Timothy tells us that “God has given us all things richly”(pg. 290). But now that we are speaking of the earth as a gift from God, things change. It is not that man actually trespasses mankind, it is that he is being disrespectful to God when he spoils that which God has given him. It seems as though that the ‘evil’ of the spoiler isn’t due to his trespass against mankind, but rather to his irreverence.